City of God

Not a long time back I had seen this movie, the City of God. Unfortunately my version of the movie was in Portuguese, so I had to download its English subtitles after having peeped into the plot once and understanding not much. Once armed with the subtitles it became much cleaner; the movie was much into being a protagonist of violence and crime, of love and lust, of being good and honest.

The story is about a sub-urban settlement somewhere near Rio (Brazil), its people, there life and there involvement with crime and thirst for becoming powerful. Revolving round our narrator Rocket, an aspiring photographer trying hard to get himself away from the dirt of the Slums, however always finds himself between the gangsters and their business. The movie runs over two decades of his early life, when the place was terrorized by a gang of trio by their looting and bulling of local business with armed holdups; much in an urban Robin Hood fashion, one of which was Rocket’s own elder brother Goose. Attracted to their powers were the younger kids, who often joined their loot missions. But one certain incident completely turned their lives when while robbing a motel turns into slaughter of the inhabitants. Eventually also brings about the end of the gang itself, but not the criminal prospects of their followers, among which were Li’l Ze and his partner Benney. Meanwhile, Rocket started becoming a photographer though not a professional, joins a band of hippies, and infatuated with a girl in that group.

While Li’l Ze became a powerful drug dealer, Rocket could not entirely escape meeting them sometimes at parties and sometime as photographer, even loosed his girl to Benney, who was turning the new playboy of town. In midst of all these there was growing rivalry between Li’l Ze and the other drug dealers that makes one humble man Knockout Ned a part of the Durg dealing after being humiliated and his girl friend raped by Ze, even Ze killed his uncle and younger brother. As Ned turns into becoming greatest rival of Ze, frequent gun battles starts between the two fractions, the victims of which mostly are small kids wanting to become one like them. Finally all the gangsters get killed in bloody battle, Ned was killed by a kid, whose father was previously killed by Ned while looting a Bank, while Li’l Ze got captured by the police however he too was handed over to a bunch of younger underlying kids. They emptied all their bullets into his body as a revenge for killing one of them over a pretty issue. And how Rocket becomes a photographer with the News paper, well he gave the paper pictures of Li'l Zé's bullet-ridden body, which ran on the front page.

Apart from the plot itself which is based on a true story, the movie has a powerful cinematography done on the same backdrop as the real story. However it is has quite a lot of violence, I thought like comparing it with Babel, but I was entirely wrong.